jeweled platypus

 

wednesday, may 12, 2004
a can of paint it fell on my head

i spent several hours this afternoon fixing the id tags of my itunes library. yeah, that’s my favorite unproductive thing to do when i’m rather stressed from school and stuff.

a mosaic-ish rendering of most of my albums (pirated and otherwise)

amazon’s popular music search is the only true source of cover art and release years. it’s also good for total track numbers. i’m not sure about its formatting of album titles, though — sometimes they’re slightly different from the cd’s “real” title. also, i wish it let me search by song title, so i could easily see all the albums that a song is on.

ieatbrainz was somewhat helpful for identifying the albums and track numbers of some songs, but i already have most of my music painstakingly identified. i imagine this would be really good if half your music was “track 8 - unknown” or something.

gracenote’s cddb has a pretty complete set of song/album/artist information. some of its suggested album titles, however, are hopelessly obscure, and sometimes the data is incorrect. amazon is better for most of that, except for when you don’t know what album a song belongs to.

the itunes music store is perfect for figuring out those pesky genres. the chosen categorization isn’t my favorite, but it is fairly consistent. just insert the album into “search” and note the genre.

of course, it doesn’t have some particular specimens of super-awesome music, but you can guess on those genres.

hey wait, it now has the latest album! woohoo!

now i will go listen to 30-second previews on repeat for half an hour, because (alas!) the songs are too new to be well-distributed on file-sharing networks. i have a birthday in a month. maybe i will buy it.

comments (4)

gracenote's cddb is really bizarre sometimes... The biggest error I've found is that it'll call albums compilations when they aren't even close to being such. waaaah.
shawn on 5/13/2004 13:06:56

Hey, is that Clutter you're using in that screenshot? Oh, it must be, I just spotted the radioactive green selection rectangle around the Bowie album.

Cool!

(Dunno if your polymathicness extends to programming, but I'm about to open-source Clutter...)
Sprote Rsrch. on 5/25/2004 17:17:30

yes! clutter is awesome for album-collage things.

i don't program much -- only when necessary for web stuff -- but it's way cool that you're open-sourcing clutter. maybe i'll poke around. i know mister kyle will be happy...he's open sourcey to teh uber-max.
britta on 5/25/2004 20:16:12

Then bookmark http://sourceforge.net/projects/clutter/ ... sooner or later I'll get around to checking the source code into CVS. God, procrastination is a horrible trait :-/
Sprote Rsrch. on 5/27/2004 10:35:39

comments are off. for new comments, my email address is brittag@gmail.com.

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I’m Britta Gustafson.


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